Assets
I created all of the models in the scene in Maya. The cranes and balloons were created
by morphing, extruding, and smoothing primitive objects, and I arrived at the ribbons by
extruding along a Bezier curve. The textures—the table’s wood grain, the cranes’ paper,
and the milky way background image—were found online.
Technical Details
To produce my image, I implemented multi-threading to speed up the rendering
process, an option for objects such as the background plane to display independent of
lighting conditions, and depth of field. The image also incorporates transparent balloons
and a reflective table. Additionally, I allowed for objects to be selectively lit (i.e. objects
can opt to accept certain lights and ignore others) so that I could more easily illuminate
on the cranes without casting distracting and unrealistic shadows on surrounding
objects.
Design
I found it somewhat amusing to model origami—an art form depicting 3D objects with a
2D media—in the raytracer, which is used to visualize 3D meshes on a plane. I settled
on a design in which a paper crane takes flight, trying to emulate its real-life counterpart.
I originally envisioned the background as an arts and crafts room but landed on a more
calming and abstract environment, a blurred and tinted image of the milky way.
Obstacles
My initial vision called for a more dramatic depth of field, but the amount of samples I
was able to capture with my five-year old MacBook limited my choice of f-stop. For the
final image, I achieved a resolution of 960x1280 with 300 samples, which took just
under 12 hours to fully render. Implementing depth of field was surprisingly
straightforward; instead, I wrestled with bugs preventing me from incorporating
transparency (SetTransmittance must come after LoadMaterialFromAssimp!), ran into
issues when trying to create a shadow-less sky plane, and suffered some growing pains
that came with multi-threading. Positioning lights so that they were attractive yet not
distracting was also a challenge that necessitated many intermediate tweaks and
renders.